A bevy of colorful characters cross paths with each other in this novel about Montreal's garment district and its Orthodox Jewish community. If there is one thing Gershon Stein, the rent collector, knows it's that life is rented and everyone has a debt to pay: to their landlord, their family, their community, and—most of all—to their soul.

The Rent Collector

Literature & Fiction

Rotchin, B Glen

Humor & Satire

Esplanade Books

I don't want to know If your mama's a Jew If you're hung up on Islam Jesus Christ or kung fu --Fictional lyrics from "Melting Pot" by Leonard Skye Barvis Seventy-year-old Nathan Gelder has suffered a stroke. He is floating in a pool of tragic memories, half conscious of his family's visits and the ministering staff in a Toronto hospital. Past and present assail him unrelentingly. Born a half-Jew in Holland, and scarred by the loss of his parents to the Holocaust, Nathan has been forever at sea. His serene, middle class existence in Toronto, as a fastidious translator and family man, has neither prepared him for the exigencies of the late 20th century, nor helped him overcome his profound sense of loss. Confusion has led to obsession, and obsession has led to a cleansing act of retribution. As he lies suspended in his memories, his family catches wind of his crime. Is it possible this family man pushed mega-rock star Leonard Barvis to his death? The media descend. Even as their cameras besiege his paralysed body, and the rock star's fans stage riots world-wide, he pleads for vindication. Unfortunately he is on his own. Written in an elegant prose, with an equal mix of cantankerousness and mordant wit, Dead Man's Float is sweeping in its emotional impact. The result is a poignant, riveting juxtaposition of western history's darkest chapter and late twentieth century popular culture. Dead Man's Float will leave its readers gasping for air.

Dead Man's Float

Maes, Nicholas

Literary

The unconventional female protagonists who populate this remarkable collection of short stories face a bevy of challenges ranging from the mundane to the daunting. As they delve into the psychology of the modern woman, each story also experiments with form, voice, texture, and mood in a distinctive way. In one tale a truck driver and a woman in a Mustang perform an unlikely romantic duet in stream of consciousness. In another, symbolic events collide to form a female coming-of-age tale. Despite their differences in attitude and outlook, these heroines are all bound together by their constant pursuit of the truth.

Out of Cleveland

Kuby, Lolette

Contemporary

Detailing the lives of artists, lovers, brothers, and strangers, this collection of stories acutely probes love and loss, men and women together, and the family ties that bind. A father renews an old artistic rivalry with his dying son; a raucous family gathering ends in tragedy; a quick stop to pick up a hitchhiker begins a chain of events that changes a man’s life. Dark yet uplifting, these tales journey to the heart of what matters in the tangled lives of people on the edge of crisis.

Stopping for Strangers

Griffin, Daniel

Genre Fiction

Set in Montreal, New Tab spans a year in the life of a 26-year-old video game designer as he attempts to reset his life. Touching on modern social anxieties, the novel explores our obsession with social media while chronicling with humor his thoughts on Facebook chats, Concordia University, bilingualism, good parties, bad parties, a backyard cinema, running a possibly illegal DIY venue, and the disillusion, boredom, self-destruction of daily life. Written in a simple yet bold and astonishing style, New Tab is a profoundly intimate tale of self-reinvention and ambiguous relationships.

New Tab: A Novel

Morissette, Guillaume

Nominee: 2016 Lambda Literary Award, Gay Fiction A visceral new voice in gay fiction gives a novel on the life lessons learned by a homosexual man as he ages and matures A bold and explicit debut novel by one of the most visceral new voices in gay fiction, Breathing Lessons is the story of Henry Moss, a homosexual everyman whose life knows none of the limitations or abuses his predecessors experienced. When a teenaged Henry came out to his mother, she worried only that he’d be lonely. At the time, he thought her concerns were old-fashioned. Two decades later, he’s had supportive family and friends, he’s well-liked by the athletes who train with him, trusted in his professional life, parties whenever he pleases, and performs all manner of sexual acts with whomever he wants. But as he gets older and, increasingly, the men he sleeps with are married, Henry finds that his mother may have been right. Can he find the lasting intimacy he craves in his life amidst the equal-opportunity freedom afforded by his generation’s openness? Learning to navigate between the two is as delicate as learning to breathe again.

Breathing Lessons: A Novel

Sinclair, Andy

Ex-Yu: Stories

Novakovich, Josip

English Is Not a Magic Language

Poulin, Jacques

A visceral tale of obsession and creativity, unrequited passions and the power of music. A love story in which art is a foil to companionship, and the intellect an interlocutor of the heart. In the utterly unique All that Sang, the second fiction by Lambda Literary Award-finalist Lydia Perovic, a Toronto opera critic on assignment in Paris falls in love with the subject she’s been sent to interview, France’s leading female conductor. But is the attention evenly matched, is genuine connection even possible? Perovic guides us through the panorama that orbits contemporary courtship. The jilted lover, the housekeeper, the chiropractor, the manager, all take part in a chorus of voices that illustrate the unknowable creative spirit whose inaccessibility fires the writer’s obsession. Reminiscent of the bold and inventive fictions of Ali Smith and Siri Hustvedt, postmodern refractions play with the reader’s sense of perspective to build the persona of affection, a figure of reality and imagination that we all recognize but can never truly access.

All That Sang

Perovic, Lydia

A career-focused woman finds her life taken off course by an unexpected pregnancy. A troubled doctor abandons her family on her daughter’s birthday, the three-tiered pastel layer cake in the passenger seat beside her. A young mother must contend with how to explain her husband’s suicide to their child. In her first story collection, Lesley Trites digs bravely into the dilemmas faced by contemporary women who must be everything to everyone. Written with keen insight and deep affection, Lesley Trites’s A Three-Tiered Pastel Dream unearths pearls of wisdom from the secret lives of everyday women.

A Three-Tiered Pastel Dream: Stories

Trites, Lesley

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